A blockchain with a hashing function doing useful work

[ctoon6]

heres what i think, nobody has ever proposed a system that will work in a decentralized way, that does "useful work". every proposition has been, "hey lets do protein folding!". please tell me how that would ever work? i am not saying there is no way, i am saying nobody has yet thought of it yet, or at least to what i have seen.

[Meni Rosenfeld]

I think you're completely missing the point of this project, and are far too serious .

Probably. Carry on then .

Maybe not in this thread, but people have been seriously suggesting that Bitcoin proof-of-work should be based on external distributed computing projects.

[maaku]

Yeah, that would never work.

The bitcoin protocol actually has two proof-of-work-functions: one to generate a block (securing the network), and one to generate new coins (setting monetary policy). The 'a-ha!' moment was when we realized these need not necessarily be the same, as they are with bitcoin. With merge-mining the block generating function can be shared across all blockchains, and each chain is then free to set its own coin generating function and policies.

There's some interesting things you can do with this setup; these BOINC-based coins is just a proof of concept for something much grander.